Progress has been made in several areas of the layouts of late including the rebuilding of one fiddle yard on the Top Deck layout aka Folkestone East. It pays to live with a layout for a while before advancing it too much. This way, you will find out where it is lacking, operationally speaking. An additional road and more careful road length measurement in the ‘Dover’ fiddle yard has freed up operations quite a bit. The ‘Ashford’ yard also received minor attention too. This work is intrinsically uninteresting in terms of lifting track, adjusting the turnouts, measuring new road lengths and relaying the track again, in a different formation! Little worth posting here at this time. However, there’s been some new stuff about.

I liked the look of this non-slip work bench mat offered by DCC Supplies. For £6, it is a soft surface which does not scratch models and those holes catch small screws and fittings. Very neat! I liked it so much, I thought that it might make a different photo stage surface for these shots of Arran Aird’s latest OO gauge (1:76) containers (C-Rail Intermodal) which includes a 20ft. reefer and fully assembled and decorated 20ft dry boxes.

The 40ft. reefer has already been released by C-Rail Intermodal and has been previously featured in my blog. You can find it here… One of the benefits of the work bench mat will be to protect models when installing decoders, especially the more delicate N gauge ones…

These very smart-looking Class 56s will be a much welcomed addition to the Dudley Heath project which makes its next appearance at the BRM Peterborough show in the Autumn.

Testing so far has shown them to be very smooth and controllable. The lighting is subtle too! More soon…

Welcome to OMWB (On My Work Bench). I will be blogging about my latest projects and other happenings in the world of model railways and my life in general.
Some non-railway subjects may creep in: the daily antics of our four cats, renewable energy, gardening, travel, life in the Scottish Highlands and many of the other things that make up the work bench of life.